Whether you watched the Super Bowl for the football, halftime show or just the commercials a huge amount of people had their attention turned to the last game of the NFL season. As with every year the commercials are a big talking point, and some brands did better than others.

We’ll give you three questions you can ask during the planning phase of your marketing activities to give you the best results.

Millions of Dollars wasted because they didn’t understand their goals and audience.

In 2018 there were over 80 commercials during the Super Bowl, not every one is a homerun, but every single one is expensive. The average cost of a 30 second ad in 2019 was around $5 million. That’s more than a majority of small businesses will make this year all spent on a single ad. Now for most of these brands it’s a drop in the bucket and not a huge deal. The problem comes when you spend all that money on the spot, and even more on the creative and actually shooting and editing the commercial only for it to go over like a lead balloon.

In years past there’s usually a 5-8 commercials that really stand out as funny or emotional that really connect with viewers and more importantly potential customers. This year a lot of brand mailed it in with their big game commercials. There was trend of a lot of brands leaning on nostalgia. Even worse than having uninspired ideas are ideas that don’t accomplish anything or don’t resonate with your target customer.

Let’s look at one of Bud Light’s commercials for example. Bud Light for the past year has gone all in on it’s medieval themed commercials ever since the success of “Dilly Dilly”. This year they tried to keep the momentum going with another medieval commercial this time with Corn Syrup as a main focus. Here’s a link if you haven’t seen it yet.

I can’t speak for the minds behind the commercial I’m sure they meant well, but it was poorly executed. Knowing your audience is key and Bud Light and their creative team doesn’t seem to understand that their customers drinking Bud Light probably aren’t as health focused as other consumers and this not worried about corn syrup being included in their beer. While the commercial generated a laugh it failed to actually resonate with customers. And worse it probably cost them a few as seen with many corn farmers pouring out their supplies of Bud Light.

A failure to understand your customer and a failure to establish a concise goal for their commercial has now lead to controversy and will surely end up costing them extra money in PR damage control. And I doubt they’ve actually convinced anyone that was on the fence about Bud Light to buy their beer because it happens to not have corn syrup.

At the end of the day there are 3 questions you can ask to make sure any marketing activity is going to be effective.